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Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Completed: Flower Girl Dress

Amanda had a lovely vision for Eliza's dress. She pinned a photo way back when (I'll show you in a minute), but it was from a photographer's site and not a sewing/fashion source. So I started with a pattern and did my best to replicate the dress.

We were unanimous in really liking the result. (What will follow is an exorbitant number of photos, for which I cannot apologize. The combination of the warm, fuzzy memories of the wedding day and the adoration I have for my sister, combined with the realization that Eliza will go from age three to 23 in the blink of an eye, has me feeling like there will never ever EVER be enough photos/memories of her at this age.)

I started with McCall's 6304 -- a wonderful romper pattern. A muslin revealed that the smallest size of the pattern was too big, so I made some serious adjustments to the width of the bodice and re-drafted the armholes. In addition I drafted a peter pan collar.

Here's the original photo Amanda pinned. I tried really, really hard to find the original source for this photo but had no luck. The watermark will have to do.

I forgot to add sleeves, and in hindsight I would have used the Norah Dress collar to aid in the beading.

The photos that follow are from the wedding day. My mom did her hair.

To bead the collar, I searched for tutorials and landed on this one. Through trial and error, I realized that the best way to bead the collar would be one pearl at a time. The first attempt resulted in pearls that were too crowded and bunched up. I ripped the whole thing and started over, giving more space between beads with more success. There are still gaps in places, and I can see how I'd do things differently next time, but for my first attempt I'll call it good and done.

We were kind of ambivalent about a belt. Originally we thought a gold sparkly one would work, but it turns out it's hard to match gold to gold. Last week I went to our local fabric store - Let's Sew - and Louis helped me find the PERFECT trim. Originally it just had the light-colored pearls, so I added in the gold pearls I was using in the collar to tie things together. The shiny gold in the belt trim perfectly matches the gold in the fabric.

The dress is fully lined with cream-colored bemberg rayon on the bodice and a sweet linen with embroidered pink flowers for the skirt (it doesn't match, but it was in my stash and needed to be used).

The fabric! The fabric is from Mood. It's PERFECT (and sold out unfortunately). It's a rayon brocade -- you can really see the detail in the photos above.

Mom found this little shrug at H&M while we were in Nashville for our girls' night. It was great for keeping her (relatively) warm the day of the wedding.

This one also held up really well, and she'll be able to wear it for a while.

I'm completely amazed with your creation! It's so utterly perfect (and I can't even find words for that Collar! Truly a labour of love. You should be very proud! (oh, and little Elsa is the most adorable model. So cute)

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